This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to the management of reports related to imposter accounts in a social network system.
Social networking systems allow users to create accounts that are tied to their identities. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. An imposter account is one created by a bad actor to impersonate another person or entity, or is an account that inaccurately represents someone other than the person who is using the account. Traditionally social networking systems have handled imposter accounts by allowing users to report imposter accounts as they come across them. Typically a social networking system manages these reports through a review process. The review process must handle the case where an innocent account is accused by a mistaken or malicious user. For example, when a social networking system receives a report from a user that identifies an alleged imposter account, the review process may use a human agent to contact the accused account-holder in order to verify their identity.
Such a manual review process may require significant human resources. In recent years, the volume of reports from users of social networking systems has made the management of these reports an overwhelming task. In addition, the sheer number of reports has tended to degrade the user-experience of social networking systems by subjecting many innocent users to unnecessary and burdensome user-verification procedures when they are mistakenly or maliciously reported.
For these reasons there has been a pressing need for a system that can manage the stream of user reports and reduce the number of false reports that are submitted to the reviewing process.